Google Knowledge Panels & Personal Branding with Jason Barnard

Show: Revenue Optimization with StatsDrone
Episode: Google Knowledge Panels & Personal Branding with Jason Barnard
Host: John Wright
Guest: Jason Barnard
Published: Thu, 02 May 2024 13:27:00 +0000
Duration: 54:32

Speaker labels are a two-speaker split from pauses (host vs guest). Timestamps are `[HH:MM:SS]` from the episode audio. Light ASR; names and brands may need a pass.

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[00:00:00] John Wright: If you're an affiliate site and you can't be transparent, you're going to struggle all the way because human beings are looking for transparency. Notability is going to be important. Expertise and experience are going to be important. And if you think about what EDAT represents for Google, it's Google's emulation of what credibility looks like to human beings. They're trying to train a machine to judge like a human being what trust and credibility looks like. They're not there yet, but they're on their way there. So is it better to focus on where Google is going or where Google is now? I would argue it's better to aim on where it's going

[00:00:39] John Wright: and make the most of what we've got today. I'm John Wright, and you're listening to Affiliate BI, the business intelligence and affiliate marketing podcast brought to you by StatsTech. Welcome to the Affiliate BI podcast. Today, we're chatting with Jason Barnard. So I wanted to be very clear on the pronunciation. And you can correct me. We'll probably say it a couple of times. And there's a reason why we're going to get into that. Jason is the founder of Calla Cube, which is a company that does brand marketing and SEO. And I'm going to pass it back to you, Jason, to tell us a bit more what you do, because I know we're going to talk a lot about branding.

[00:01:17] John Wright: But you're the brand SERP guy, so let's get into it. Brilliant. Thank you so much. Well, there are a couple of points there. Number one is Jason Barnard. And we'll talk about why I say it so clearly and why I'm now going to say Jason Barnard, B-A-R-N-A-R-D. That's for the machines and not for the audience. And the second is you said brand marketing and SEO. And I love that, because I'm seen to be somebody from the SEO industry, which I kind of am. But what I'm actually doing is branding and marketing packaged for SEO.

[00:01:56] John Wright: So Calla Cube is all about your brand, the marketing materials you create to promote that brand. And we take all of that and we package it for Google, Bing, Perplexity, Chat GPT, all of these machines. And so the SEO for us is simply packaging, content, and branding for machines. That makes sense. And I think I've got obviously a whole bunch of questions prepared, but I've gone on my own journey of self-branding, promoting myself. We got a SaaS company, so I just figured I think I need to do this. I wasn't sure what the benefit was. I started with LinkedIn,

[00:02:35] John Wright: got really good there in terms of building up my profile, getting a lot of impressions. Then I started doing YouTube where I was very uncomfortable doing it, but I said, I need to do this. I'm watching the likes of like, Craig Campbell, James Dooley,

[00:02:48] Jason Barnard: everyone even doing this for their own SaaS company. So yeah, it's maybe just touch upon how personal branding has a strong correlation into SEO. Yeah, well, the first thing I'd like to point out is that SEO tends to be focused on the website of the company or the person. And you just talked about LinkedIn and YouTube and didn't even mention the website, and that's hugely important, is that the website is simply the hub, the central focus point of all of your online activity as a brand, company, or a person. And as a person, I was just talking to James Dooley about this.

[00:03:27] Jason Barnard: For him, his personal brand over the last seven years has brought in millions of dollars. And he said, I think it was seven years ago, he talked to me, I said, brand SERPs, focus on brand SERPs, think about how you look and think about what that means, because when somebody searches your name on Google, Google is simply representing or reflecting the world's opinion of you. And if you start thinking about that, you say, well, if I can improve the world's opinion of me, I improve how Google represents me. And by doing the first one, i.e. making myself look better than my audience, more credible, more helpful,

[00:04:07] Jason Barnard: more impressive, more authoritative, Google sees that and then reflects it in my brand SERP. So when my bottom of funnel clients, customers hires, James talks about hiring people. When they research me before doing business with me or choosing to work with my company instead of a competitor, they see something super, super impressive. And that is worth millions of dollars to any decent sized company. The personal brand of the CEO is worth millions of dollars to the company. That makes a lot of sense.

[00:04:45] Jason Barnard: I think after going through my journey of doing the social media stuff and then starting a podcast, I'm not counting millions yet, but I'm starting to see a lot of positive spin-offs. And funny enough, the things that I tell people about what I've experienced on this side of having a podcast is the knowledge I gain from talking to people, that's probably number one. And number two is the networking I get. Everything else is like gravy or icing on the cake. And that alone is still worth doing. But there's a really huge point then because if you package what you're doing

[00:05:21] Jason Barnard: for Google and the other machines being perplexity, you then get the bonus that they will amplify the effects that you have had by networking and meeting people because they'll introduce you to new people and they'll make you look super impressive to those new people. And those new people are asking the machines because they trust the machines. So the machines are recommending you and the people will believe them. Whereas when you're talking to me, it's you saying it.

[00:05:54] John Wright: And what's lovely here, sorry, what's lovely here is by being smart with your online personal brand is you can convince the machines to right land you. You can manipulate the situation. I said, manipulate, you actually have to walk the walk. If you're to convince these machines long-term, you have to walk the walk. So it's not manipulating, it's changing your own reality because they will reflect the reality that they see. And maybe that has a positive spin-off where like our company is staff strong. And for years we get enough brand search, but I'm wondering if things are starting to change

[00:06:31] John Wright: where I've been building up my personal brand, I'm starting to win more trust. I'm hearing from people that, how did you hear about us? And then it's like referrals and maybe the search for our brand is actually very different than it used to be. Where if it's already got someone, maybe if it's implanted in their mind that this brand for me as a person and the company is more trustable, maybe we're actually seeing better conversion rates and like an uptick in business that maybe it's hard to actually measure in just straight up search console data. Right, and there's a really interesting point there is that there is a certain amount you can measure. What we've seen is that a company

[00:07:09] John Wright: that isn't well-known in its space will have a click-through rate on the homepage or to the website of 20 to 30, maybe 40%. A company that's incredibly well-known will have a click-through rate of 90% because the company that's well-known, people are doing a navigational search, the company that's less well-known, people are doing a research search. So if you're less well-known, you're getting 20 to 50, 60% click-through rate to your website, you need to focus on how that brand search looks, what you look like when people are searching your name or your company name

[00:07:47] John Wright: because those are the bottom of funnel audience who are researching you before doing a deal. If you're Facebook, you don't need to worry about that. You need to focus 95% click-through rate on that first result. So I obviously have your book here, Brand Serps for Business. And would you say that for what you work on, that people come to you for one reason, but they're leaving for something else? Like all the things that we're talking about, like the benefits, they're maybe thinking, oh, I just need to sort this one part of our business, like get like, you know, organize, you know, how Google views us. So they come for that thinking that, okay, this is gonna add like an extra couple percent, but then they're walking away with something more profound,

[00:08:27] John Wright: which is like, wait a minute, this branding in the personal and the business is actually probably the most valuable thing that anyone should work on. A hundred percent, that's a really good point. People come with that specific problem and walk away with a solution to all their digital marketing problems. We say at CaliQ, the CaliQ process, which is what we call this, our approach to digital marketing, both for brands and for people, the CaliQ process has solved digital marketing and it has. All we're doing is looking at the brand serve

[00:09:03] John Wright: to understand what Google hasn't understood, what it's misunderstood. Then we work to correct it and to correct it, we need to go out onto the internet and correct all the information that's made it misunderstand. And by doing so, we're building an amazing digital marketing strategy. You mentioned LinkedIn. If Google isn't ranking LinkedIn, but I think it's important to my audience, if I focus on LinkedIn, Google will then rank it when somebody searches my name. If it doesn't rank it, when I'm working very hard to build an audience on LinkedIn, I can pretty safely assume that it isn't the right strategy. I've picked the wrong platform.

[00:09:41] John Wright: Because if Google doesn't see it as valuable to the subset of its users who are your audience, then it probably isn't. But I would take that a step further and I would say, then look at your competitors brand serves and see what the commonalities are. That will tell you exactly where you need to focus. Okay. And I know for my specific challenge, I'm kind of bringing up like small personal case studies is what we do is we're like an aggregator. I call ourselves like the QuickBooks for affiliates. We pull in data. And what I personally believe to be true is people aren't, they're problem aware, but they're not solution aware. So we don't really have our own set of keywords. We're not an SEO tool

[00:10:21] John Wright: that you just say keyword ranker, SEO tools, SEO audits. So people just don't really find us. They tend to know our brands. And we know, yeah, my belief is from my research, maybe one to 2% of affiliates globally use our app or our competitors. And it's not a lot. Right. And that's a good point is, CaliCube has the same problem. People don't realize they have the problem until we explain it to them. So a huge part of the work we do at CaliCube is educating the world. So we have a huge marketing department run by Joanne. And we're trying to get the word out to people

[00:10:59] John Wright: to explain to them that this is a problem. And we have the solutions, the problem they didn't know they had. And you have the same issue. And that comes down now for us of omnipresence. And now I get people coming on sales calls saying, I know what I want. I know what you do. I know you're the guy. Cause I see that red shirt everywhere when I'm researching the topic. And I say, where did you learn about the topic? And they said, oh, from you. Yeah. And that sales call is then, how long does it take? How much does it cost? That's the simplest sales call in the world. And that's my personal brand and CaliCube's communication and our marketing and our education that has made that happen.

[00:11:38] John Wright: So my personal brand is hugely important to come to you. So in some aspects, a SaaS company could look at what you do from a content perspective and say, okay, let's just reverse engineer what you do. And that would probably at least be a good framework to start with. Yeah. And a lot of it is creating a lot of content that educates the world, explains to them what the solution is and why it will help them. But most importantly, it's get the content in the places where your audience is naturally looking because they don't know to come to your website. So you need to go and find them on YouTube, on LinkedIn, on Forbes, on all of these different platforms. They're looking there.

[00:12:18] John Wright: And then you can place the solution in front of them and say, well, actually here's a solution to a problem you didn't know you had. Get their interests. Then what do they do? They start Googling and searching around the topic to figure out exactly what it is they need to understand. They keep saying the red shirt, seeing the red shirt. Then they Google my name, then they Google Cali Cube, then they set up the call, then they buy. It's a hugely long process and it's a lot of work. But I think you've already experienced the benefits firsthand. Yeah, what we've seen at Cali Cube is in the three years since we've implemented the Cali Cube process full on with the team of 20 people,

[00:12:58] John Wright: we've seen an increase of, I think it was 20% in the first year, 60% in the second year. Now we're at four times income in just three years. And this year we're looking for another 50%, the year after that we're looking. The growth is phenomenal. And I was talking to James Dooley early on about it. We have a flywheel going and the leads are just coming in and we were struggling for leads the first couple of years. Now we're not struggling for leads. We're struggling to get rid of the people who aren't actually good clients for us before the sales calls happen. So that's a hugely wonderful situation to be in, but it took us three years to get here. And there's my question for you.

[00:13:36] John Wright: How long did it take you to get to where you are? Probably a good two years. Like I kind of wish I had this opportunity to chat with you two years ago, but we didn't really know what we were doing, or at least I didn't. We tried a lot of outbound sales and we were doing like a lot of, I hate this word, marketing automation, which is like basically bulk email spam. We did that and was actually pissing off people and they're like, if you do this one more time, I'm gonna report you. It's like, look, I was just trying to pitch you, of course, and so now it's like, even if we wanna do outreach, we have to be very, we have to find a way to like even drive value. So we basically said, let's go inward and let's try a couple things.

[00:14:16] John Wright: And those things were slowly paying off, but yeah, talking to Kyle Roof, when I interviewed him, he said, yeah, after doing video and podcasting as a guest or doing your own show, after a year, the inbound, the leads start becoming inbound. He's like, we don't do any outbound. And as of today, we're over 10 people and we have no sales. It's just all inbound right now. We're like, we're super grateful for it. And we're like, well, what does this look like if we actually add sales? We're like, no, let's not do that because we're busy already. You know, the kicker in that is that all of this work people do to build their personal brand or their brand,

[00:14:55] John Wright: the branding, the marketing. Ironically, they're not getting the maximum value because they're not packaging it for Google across the board. So what's actually happening and what we saw with CaliCube is that people are missing out on the part that would amplify it across the entire Google ecosystem, but also Bing, also chat GPT, also Plexity, all of these machines work the same way. And the thing that I find a pity is people tend to just move forwards with creating content, being a guest, maybe writing a book, publishing articles,

[00:15:34] John Wright: and they don't stop to think, how can I amplify the stuff I've already done before I start doing new stuff? Right. And the other point is stop focusing on keywords. You've got a topic you need to build around the topic and you need to build answers to questions around that topic, which Coraigabur is calling Topical Authority. It's answer all the questions around your topic, become the super expert in your topic, niche down and be out there and amplify as much as you possibly can what you already have by taking the branding and the marketing that you're doing and packaging it for these machines, not on your website, but all across the internet,

[00:16:14] John Wright: and then use your website as the central hub that joins all dots for Google and the other machines. I learned a little bit of this by one of my previous guests was Leche Lewis, who does a lot of B2B content, and she focuses on bottom of funnel. So that's B-O-F-U in case Google's listening on us, which we know is probably gonna happen. So she basically said, when I initially chided with her, I said, what would you focus on for our SaaS website? And she said, first thing right off the bat is us versus our competitors and the alternatives too. She's like, not a lot of volume there, but when people are looking, they already have an idea of what they're looking for.

[00:16:52] John Wright: And yeah, that's actually been pretty helpful to do that. Well, I would start with your brand because those are the people who already know who you are and you need to convert them, you need to convince them. And if you can get Google to give you a great brand, sir, the search engine results page for your brand name, then it might trust you to rank when you're comparing yourself to your competitors, but until it trusts you, it won't rank those pages. So I would argue, if you haven't got the brand, you don't have a real hope long-term to rank for those comparative pages, my two cents. I think I agree in the sense that one thing

[00:17:32] John Wright: that we didn't do enough of, we did it in pitching for investors. Like we had to explain our story. Oh, this is why we created our app and this is the mistakes we made, which led to this amazing discovery. And this is why we're super passionate about our topic. And I have the page half written out for the About Us page that I wanna build, like one that tells the story. It's got like, you know, the hero, everything. So I actually think you're right. That one's probably number one. And then I think the alternatives to, or the comparisons, I think those are good. But- I think they're great. I mean, sorry, what I'm saying actually, to be fair, is understanding of your brand and appreciation of your brand

[00:18:11] John Wright: will improve your chances of ranking for those things. Then I would say brand plus reviews, CaliCube reviews, definitely go for that. Because that's the one where people are saying, okay, final check. What does the world say about this? And Google will represent you by the reviews that it understands to be valuable and helpful to your audience. So it needs to understand who you are, who your audience is, and which platforms are naturally helpful to them. So once again, we come back to understanding, if Google doesn't understand who you are and which audience you serve, it will rank the wrong review site.

[00:18:50] John Wright: So everything that CaliCube comes down to, does Google understand who you are, what you do, which audience you serve? That's the foundation. Which I think leads to the reason why companies like G2 and clutch.co are so valuable in terms of not just the revenue they make, but what they do. I think, you know, even though people are starting with a Google search mindset, they're going, I need real people behind this to trust. And this is pretty much an extension of branding. And if you look at EEAT, then we call it NEAT with notability and transparency and add it to that.

[00:19:29] John Wright: We can call it credibility, NEAT credibility. You need to demonstrate that your audience, your users, your clients, see you as a credible solution that they appreciate you. You also need to prove that your peers appreciate you as a personal branding perspective. And you need to prove that you have the experience and the expertise to make you an expert in the field. So the whole EEAT question is, let's move beyond links. Links are still important, but let's move beyond that and start looking at an understanding of a person or a company and what credibility signals can we attach to the thing itself.

[00:20:08] John Wright: Awards, a number of years in business, qualifications, peer group approval, user approval, reviews. None of that is attached to your website. It's all attached to the website owner, the company, or the content creator, the person who wrote the article or created the video. Website owner, content creator are the single most important new terms that we all need to focus on because that's what EEAT is based on. It's the foundation. And if you look at Google's Quality Rate of Guidelines, they've replaced website with website owner.

[00:20:45] Jason Barnard: And now they talk about content creator, I think 128 times. I can't remember the exact number, but I counted them for a search engine land article. It's astonishing how they've shifted in a couple of years from website to talking to their quality rate, to guide their quality rate, find out who the website owner is. How easy is it to find out who they are? When you find out who they are, are they credible? Do you feel that they're a credible trustworthy solution? Same thing for the content creator. Who's created the content? Do you trust them? Do they look trustworthy? Yes or no. Obviously, Google are looking to train the machine

[00:21:22] Jason Barnard: to understand what trust for a content creator looks like and trust for a website owner looks like. They're not looking to emulate what trust for a website looks like because trust for a website looks like lots of inbound links. So links are still important because they link to the website and that affects the website owner and it affects the content creator and the content itself. But you can go beyond that and start thinking, in addition to the links, what can I do? So I've got maybe two questions in one, which is, I think affiliate sites had a reputation for being pretty cold where they're just meant to sell.

[00:22:00] Jason Barnard: And for the ones that do put like the author behind it or the brand story where there's real people, I'm wondering if they've experienced better conversion rates. And I was just wondering if you had an experience on that or an opinion. Well, I have an opinion, I don't have experience. We don't work with affiliate sites generally speaking because affiliate sites tend to not have a brand. We work just on brand. So if you don't have a brand and you can't be transparent, the CaliQ process will not work for you.

[00:22:35] Jason Barnard: And my gut feeling about that is the transparency aspect. If you're an affiliate site and you can't be transparent, you're gonna struggle all the way because human beings are looking for transparency. Notability is gonna be important, expertise and experience are gonna be important. And if you think about what EDAT represents for Google, it's Google's emulation of what credibility looks like to human beings. They're trying to train a machine to judge like a human being what trust and credibility looks like. They're not there yet, but they're on the way there.

[00:23:11] Jason Barnard: So is it better to focus on where Google is going or where Google is now? I would argue it's better to aim on where it's going and make the most of what we've got today. But at the end of the day, if you're doing fine today in a four years time, your company has gone bankrupt. I don't want a company like that, but that's just my opinion. I've seen other SaaS companies do this. And honestly, I was guilty of this a couple of years ago of doing kind of cookie cutter, like top of funnel content. And I'm watching other SaaS companies kind of do the same where it isn't the founder writing it. So I've been in affiliate marketing

[00:23:51] Jason Barnard: and parts of SEO for like a good 20 years. So I feel like as much as I'd like to outsource this or find another expert, I just feel that it needs to be written by me. And yeah, I'm just seeing a lot of other companies where it's like I read the article, I look at it, I'm like, it's not the founder, it's less than a thousand words. There's not really a lot of effort put behind it. And kind of funny that you mentioned, authority, trust, branding, it's all going full circle.

[00:24:19] Jason Barnard: People come for SEO, but they don't realize people that are really good at SEO understand all these things that you're talking about. 100%, and you talk about it wasn't written by the founder or the CEO. Google has quadrupled the number of people in the Knowledge Graph. So it now understands four times more people than it did a year ago. Why? Because it wants to attach an understood entity in the Knowledge Graph to the writer, the author, the content creator. It's the only way it can apply EEIT signals. So Google is now trying to understand everybody

[00:24:57] Jason Barnard: because it wants to know, is the author a credible EEIT friendly person?

[00:25:06] John Wright: That's point number one. Point number two is that the upshot of that is also, if it can understand who the author is, it can understand which content is AI generated and which isn't. And you can say, well, I can actually just create AI content and put it under my name. Problem there is Bill Schlauske talked about author vectors. We all have a style that's easily identifiable. So if you don't write your articles yourself, Google will catch you out because it will understand that it isn't written by you. Or if you do it over time and you just always create these AI articles yourself,

[00:25:45] John Wright: it will think that you write that way. And then you're stuck with an AI machine writing all your content for you and you have no personality and no self-determination. And that's a huge part of this. It's very philosophical, but these machines are gonna get super smart. Right now they're fairly simplistic. The day they get smart, they're gonna take control of your own personal brand away from you because they're gonna understand things about you that you didn't even know were out there. If you don't take control today, you're gonna have huge problems three or four years down the line.

[00:26:20] John Wright: So self-determination in a world of AI machines

[00:26:27] Jason Barnard: that approach singularity where the machines are smarter than we are, self-determination becomes the single most important thing for all of us as human beings because otherwise they represent us exactly the way they want. You want to control it. And that's what we do at KennaCue. Okay, I got a really challenging question that I'm pretty sure you'll be able to answer. The first question I was gonna ask, which I'm gonna add an amendment to,

[00:26:51] Jason Barnard: in the first chapter of your book, the fundamentals of brand SERPs for business is called Optimizing Your Home Page. So what I originally wrote is why is it important? And the second part that I wanted to add the spin on it is we've hired both a company called User Active to redesign our SaaS app. We did parts of the webpage on it where their product focused company. Then we also hired Conversion Wise to improve the sales aspect. And we had these two companies fighting. And I'd love to have these two in a boxing ring and see who would win. And I kind of think I might know your answer, but I'm gonna pass it back to you for your opinion. I don't know the two companies. I don't know which one would win.

[00:27:31] Jason Barnard: Okay. The point of the homepage, and Joost about said this years ago, should be your brand and your offer. It shouldn't be a keyword. It should be your brand. Your homepage is all about bringing your bottom of funnel audience onto the homepage because they've searched your brand name. That homepage is designed or should be designed to tell your audience, you've understood who we are. So they have the mindset, they know who you are, basically. You need to explain to them exactly what you can offer them and why they should choose you. That's it.

[00:28:09] Jason Barnard: And sorry, what it is you can offer them, what solution, why they should choose you and what the next step is. So there are three things. Everything always in threes at CaliQ. What's the next step? Because the homepage is never a final destination. It's always a stepping stone to somewhere else on your website. And if you think about it that way, your homepage is gonna work really well for you. And we have a thing at CaliQ called the entity home. And the entity home is the page that Google and the other AI machines refer to to understand what you're saying about yourself. Understand who you are, what you do, which audience you serve. Then they take that information that you have provided

[00:28:49] Jason Barnard: and they check around the internet. Is the rest of the world saying the same thing? If it is, becomes fact. That statement of fact about yourself needs to be on your about page, not on your homepage. The about page is for the machines and for people who are researching in detail who you truly are. The homepage is for presenting who you are, sorry, presenting your offer, why you're credible and what the next steps are. And if you separate those two, you have two pages, each with a clear role, and it makes total sense both to your users and to the machines.

[00:29:29] Jason Barnard: And in terms of personal branding, you wanna have a personal brand and build it. You need a hub that the machines recognize and human beings recognize as being you about you. And that only needs two pages, the homepage, I just got lots of balloons, and the about page. So two page website for any individual is going to do what you need to do to get your personal brand going. Because it's there to explain to users who you are, why you're credible, what they can do with you next, to the machines about you, and to join the dots for the machines by pointing out to all the resources with links

[00:30:08] Jason Barnard: that you believe make total sense in terms of what you're trying to achieve today. And would you say as well for the homepage, you don't necessarily need to fill out your about, but you can have like a small snippet to encourage them, it's like, hey, we're an actual, there's people behind the company. Yeah, a small snippet, as you say, couple of sentences or one sentence that says read more here and then they go through. Having said that, the link shouldn't say read more here, it should say read more about CaliCube here or read more about CaliCube. I like the two little lines there brackets,

[00:30:43] John Wright: but each thereon, but the anchor text is super, super important, especially in branded search.

[00:30:49] Jason Barnard: Making sure that those anchor texts explain what's on the other side has always been important, but it's even more important in branded search. So CaliCube's Twitter, CaliCube on Facebook, it can just be Facebook because Google potentially understands that within that website, the Facebook link is gonna be CaliCube. Facebook, that said, why not be more explicit? CaliCube, Facebook, sorry, CaliCube on Facebook, CaliCube on Twitter, CaliCube on LinkedIn. The only problem you then come across is the redundancy that gets boring for human beings. The machines never get bored of the repetition. So you need to find that balance and that's one of the tricks we play at CaliCube.

[00:31:29] Jason Barnard: Would you say rich snippets is important for some of this company brand as well as personal brand to include like your LinkedIn link for the author pages and things like this? You need to join the dots. You need to truly think about how, what I understand in my head, natively and instinctively, needs to be explained explicitly to the machine. So everything that you can link together that makes sense is good to go. So you're gonna link to your LinkedIn profile if it's important. If you're not using Instagram, don't link to it because it isn't actually helpful.

[00:32:08] Jason Barnard: It's not helpful to your audience either. And that's kind of the final point on this particular aspect. Think about your users. I mean, Google say, it's completely unhelpful. Think about your users. But if you think about the people that you're doing business with or you will do business with and you optimize your branding and your marketing for them, you stand where they're looking, you present them with the solution, you prove or you demonstrate that you're credible, invite them down the funnel. And then you package all of that for the machines. Then you've got a great SEO strategy. So when Google say focus on the user, that's what they mean. They just don't say it very eloquently.

[00:32:46] Jason Barnard: Stand where your audience is looking, demonstrate your credibility, provide your audience with a demonstration that you have the solution for the problem they're looking for on the platforms that they're looking at. Then package it for Google, join all the dots together using your entity home and your website and Google becomes a bonus. Chat GPT becomes a bonus. Perplexity becomes a bonus. Bing becomes a bonus. And that's interesting as well. They all work exactly the same. Somebody said to me the other day, oh, I've managed to get Gemini for complexity and Bing

[00:33:25] John Wright: to understand who I am and represent me correctly, but chat GPT won't do it. And I was wondering, why have you got different strategies for all four? It should be the same strategy because they all work exactly the same. Makes sense. So I'm gonna jump into my name, John Ray, which is very common as hell. What can people do like me in my situation where if we wanna try to get a knowledge panel going or we're competing against, I don't know, there's probably gonna be definitely more famous John Rates out there. There's gonna be absolutely both of them.

[00:34:02] John Wright: So you need to sit down and be realistic. If there are hundreds of thousands of John Rates, and there certainly are, there are some very famous ones. There's a cricketer I just found.

[00:34:19] Jason Barnard: There's a portrait studio, an architect in America. But if I looked in Australia, it would be three different people. You're competing with a lot of people who are more famous than you. You're dealing with ambiguity. Google has no idea which one, which of the John Rates the person is searching for. So either you have to accept that the knowledge panel will never trigger when somebody searches your name and accept that Google understands who you are, that the knowledge panel exists in its brain, and it can apply the EEAT signals through its understanding of who you are because the knowledge panel exists in its brain. It just doesn't show it

[00:34:56] Jason Barnard: because of the ambiguity and the competition. That's choice number one. Choice number two is rebrand yourself. And rebranding yourself means taking your middle initial or taking your middle name and talking about yourself consistently using the middle initial or the middle name. So for example, for me, I would say Jason Barnard becomes Jason M Barnard or Jason Martin Barnard. And that seems like a huge undertaking and it seems very scary and I lose my sense of self. But we worked with Mark Preston, now Mark A Preston,

[00:35:34] Jason Barnard: and he said, after three months, I was surprised that I was uncomfortable when people didn't say or write Mark A Preston. We get used to this incredibly quickly and we don't realize how adaptive our brains are and how adaptive our audience's brains are. And before recording, I kind of joked that, maybe people might wanna actually change their names for the benefits of knowledge panels and how Google can actually identify who you are.

[00:36:06] John Wright: I would suggest yes. I mean, as soon as you change your name, you reduce the ambiguity. If we take Jason Barnard, there are three or 400. Jason and Barnard, there's only three or four. Jason Martin Barnard, there are only two or three. So all of a sudden, there isn't any ambiguity for Google. So if I want Google to apply my EEAT signals fully,

[00:36:29] Jason Barnard: I need it to be very sure that it's me who actually wrote the content, that it's me who's talking on a podcast. And the more unique my name is, the higher the confidence level Google will have. And there's a really good point that people miss is confidence is, for me, the single most underestimated aspect of SEL. Because understanding something is one thing. Confidence in understanding is a huge, huge step above. So if Google has to choose between two different entities, two different people with the same name or two different companies

[00:37:07] Jason Barnard: choosing which one to recommend to its users, it's going to choose the one that it's most confident in the understanding of. And confidence takes time. It takes repetition. It takes care. It takes attention. And once again, at CaliCube, that's what we work on, is we work over time to build over time the confidence that the machine has. And if you think about Google as a child who's trying to learn, if you have children, you understand that you can't teach a child the history of the human race in an afternoon.

[00:37:40] John Wright: The child needs to go to school for 15 years. After 15 years, it's probably understood 1% of the history of the human race. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of reassurance. It takes a lot of repetition. And it takes a lot of repetition from multiple sources that the child trusts. Google's exactly the same. And would you say that a reason why a lot of people don't go down, not just this rabbit hole, but do this effort of what you're saying is that it's actually that, it's effort. It could be one or two years before you see a benefit. And I think we're all impulsive. Like everyone in affiliate marketing wants to make

[00:38:18] John Wright: like 10 grand in their first month, which never happens. It's like, you got to put in the work. And would you say that what you experience in looking at the rest of the world that doesn't do any of this stuff, is this like the 1% game? Well, what happens is that people start to look at it and either they start to look at it and they realize how much work it is and they give up. And they just say, I'll leave it to luck. Or they start to do it and they get some results. And they think, well, that's the job done. And the second one is the one I see most often because what they've done is started to work on their brand and Google's understanding of their brand. They get the results of the knowledge panel

[00:38:58] John Wright: and they think, job done, understood. 20% of knowledge panels are deleted every year. So you create a knowledge panel today, you've got a one in five chance, but in a year's time it will no longer exist. And that is because you haven't built up the confidence. If you work on the confidence, you work on the details, you work on joining the dots, you work on the clarity and the consistency of the repetition across multiple corroborative sources, the knowledge panel will not get deleted. The machine is very simplistic. If you're careful, you're consistent, you're clear. In your corroboration across the entire internet, the machine will build you

[00:39:37] John Wright: the most beautiful knowledge panel. It will understand you and it will be able to apply your EEAT signals either as website owner or as content creator. And once again, we talk about neat with notability and transparency, which are hugely important Google doesn't talk about. And what would some of the ways people can get started in doing this self branding without having to write a book like you or start a podcast, which I think for a lot of people is, even a YouTube channel is extremely intimidating. 100%, well, to get people to understand who you are, you don't actually need very much. People think I need to do an enormous amount,

[00:40:16] John Wright: I need to be famous to be understood. You don't need to be famous to be understood, you need to be famous to get to the top of the pile. To be understood, you need very little. For example, Lisa, who works on the CaliCute Pro team, who's the super expert at creating knowledge panels, has created a knowledge panel for herself with only four resources. Very little information about her online, she still has a knowledge panel. Google understands and it's confident in the understanding because there's little information, but it's incredibly consistent. So I think people need to take a couple of steps back and look at understanding and confidence in understanding, number one.

[00:40:55] John Wright: Number two, look at, do I need all of these resources to be understood? Or am I gonna add these resources and become notable and credible or demonstrate my credibility? Number three is, do I want to create multiple profiles across multiple different spaces or do I want to niche down and be focused? And the answer is I wanna niche down and be focused. Because if you look at it from Google's perspective, if you've got profiles on Macrack as a writer, IMDB as a film star, Google Books as an author, and Ruby Union site because you're a fan of Ruby Union, that's really confusing. It looks like four different people.

[00:41:33] John Wright: So if you're gonna do that, you have to work on making sure that Google understands that those four seemingly different people from seemingly different niches is actually the same person. And I'm a good example of somebody with multiple facets

[00:41:52] Jason Barnard: because I have a book, I have music, I have IMDB.

[00:41:59] John Wright: I was on it in a cartoon for years. I have all of these articles in the Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, Forbes. Now Forbes, it's a different niche to Search Engine Land. I have to work constantly to stop Google suddenly thinking that there's lots of different people. I need to put it all together and make it really compact and explain, educate Google that all of these seemingly different Jason Barnard's with these different careers is actually the same person. So I got two more questions that are gonna be, I'm using myself as an example. So I'm in affiliate marketing. We've got a SaaS that's in affiliate marketing. Should I say affiliate marketing is a broad enough niche

[00:42:38] John Wright: that I don't really need to say, well, I'm in the SEO space. I'm in there by default, but I don't really wanna say that I'm the SEO expert. I think affiliate marketing is a massive, like it's a massive niche on its own. And I think I'm comfortable saying, okay, let me network with all the people here. And my sub-niche is basically data science within affiliate marketing. That's what I'm kind of angling my brand towards. Right, yeah, I mean, I would generally suggest that, yes, that's perfectly reasonable to aim for a niche like that, which is quite large, but you want to think about how can I create the content

[00:43:17] John Wright: that allows me to cover that entire niche? And the answer is that's really tough. So at CaddyCube, what we've done is solve digital marketing. So we're a digital marketing niche, but we didn't try to create all the content digital marketing right off the bat. We started with knowledge panels, we started with brand SERPs, then we built in. So yes, you can aim for an entire huge niche like that, but I would suggest you create your content in siloed niches and then build upwards. And then the next question is, should I start my own website, like the johnright.com?

[00:43:54] John Wright: That one's already taken, or maybe the johncright, which, you know, for my initial. You definitely need your own website. We call it the Entity Home, and every individual should have their own website because it's your Entity Home that you need to control because it's your digital identity. Everything comes back to that. So if you create your Entity Home on Twitter, you don't own Twitter, anything could happen. Like Elon Musk could buy it, for example. If you do it on your company website, what happens when you sell the company? Your entity suddenly belongs to somebody else. You need your own website,

[00:44:33] John Wright: and you need to invest in that website. It only needs to be two pages, as I said earlier on. You can do that today, and that gives you control over time. It gives you self-determination. And that's important as well, whether big, perplexity, chat GPT, Google Gemini, Google, win this game, the assistive engine game. It doesn't matter if you have your entity home and you have control, all these machines will understand the same way. You have the same self-determination in the future. And I guess it goes without saying, we could probably assume that guys like James Dooley and Craig Campbell, they did this early on.

[00:45:12] John Wright: I don't know if this was intentional, but they definitely gained the benefit of putting effort into their own brand as a domain for what they are. And I'm pretty sure it's paid off pretty well for them. Yeah, I mean, James Dooley tells me he's made millions of dollars from his personal brand. So yes, 100% and Craig Campbell's been doing it for years. He's played around on lots of different things. He's had a lot of fun, but I think he's also wasted a lot of time and resources and energy.

[00:45:42] Jason Barnard: And I would suggest this is very simple as a process of getting these machines to understand you, but there are a lot of caveats, a lot of pitfalls. And when you have a CaliQ, we have the data. We've got 2 billion data points collected since 2015. We have the experience of having built thousands and thousands of knowledge panels, got thousands and thousands of entities into the Knowledge Graph. Nothing replaces that experience. Nothing replaces that knowledge. Nothing replaces that data. So my suggestion would be yes, do it yourself.

[00:46:21] Jason Barnard: You're a smart SEO, go ahead. On calicube.com, K-A-L-I-C-U-B-E.com, we have a free giveaway for how to create a knowledge panel. We have another giveaway which is how to create content for generative AI search and assistive engines. How to do SEO for generative AI search and assistive engines. You can do it all yourself, absolutely fine. You can also say, well, actually there's a lot about this that I don't understand and I need professional help, which sounds a little bit like going to the psychologist. But important, I think after this call, it's gonna be difficult for me not to reach out after.

[00:46:58] Jason Barnard: And the last question I ask every guess is, what do you see of the future of affiliate marketing as it intersects with business intelligence? I think affiliate marketers are going to have to start thinking about creating brands. Without a brand, you're gonna really struggle. You're gonna be fighting an uphill battle that you're gonna lose eventually as these machines understand more and more and more. They're gonna be looking behind the scenes trying to understand which person and which company is behind the website. So whatever strategy you choose to use, it needs to be a brand-based strategy

[00:47:33] Jason Barnard: where somebody or something represent or owns the website and is seen to be the owner of the website and is transparent about that. So the future of affiliate marketing is to become a brand. So a sub-question that relates to it, would you say that people that actually publicly list themselves as the owner and they do all this brand work, this is probably gonna lead to them maybe having the potential to be a stronger ranking or getting more traffic.

[00:48:03] Jason Barnard: In the space I'm in, especially in iGaming, a lot of people don't wanna put their names to it. What I'm finding is the more they put a name or face to it, whether it's streaming, YouTube, or authorship, and articles that talk about them as the owner, it seems like it's paying off for them. 100%, well, I had an interesting experience the other day is I did an interview with somebody about Knowledge Panels and she put my name in the title and it's ranking super well across the entire Google search results for Knowledge Panels, all sorts of different queries. And it's partly because the video is great, partly because of the way she formulated the questions,

[00:48:43] Jason Barnard: partly because of the value of the content, but my name is pulling it up the ranking. I'm absolutely sure of that. Okay, then one more question. What should the title of this podcast episode be? Ooh, something with my name and it would be hugely helpful to you. And that's a nice interesting point about personal brand is I then become a valuable guest because of the value I bring with my own name. My own name brings bonus, boost, value, whatever you wanna call it. For the title of the episode, we can discuss it afterwards,

[00:49:17] Jason Barnard: but it depends on which hole you're trying to fill

[00:49:25] John Wright: within your digital marketing strategy. And who you're trying to achieve. Who is gonna listen to this and found it hugely valuable. Because today we're not looking so much at which of the keywords I should use, but what is the message I want to convey to the person who I'm trying to convince to watch it. And then how do I package all of that so that Google and the other assistive engines understand who will find this useful so they then present it and push it into the conversation that they are having with their users. Because chat GPT, Gemini, Bing Co-Pilot, Perplexity are simply machines having a conversation with a person.

[00:50:02] John Wright: And you need to get them to introduce you to the conversation, recommend you as the solution once they're middle of funnel, and then say this is the perfect click at the moment when the user has got to the point where they want to make a decision to buy. The perfect click is the user has come all the way down the funnel on Perplexity, on Chat VPT, on Gemini, or on Bing Co-Pilot. They have been brought down that funnel by the machine to the point in which the machine is saying this is the result, the single result that makes the most sense to you given what I've understood in our conversation. They click, they buy, job done. And to elaborate on that,

[00:50:40] John Wright: it's actually a very interesting insight because I sometimes do content that helps other SaaS companies. So as I've gone through my journey of branding and growing our SaaS company, I've had other companies approach me saying, hey, I'm looking for help or how do you get started with a podcast and all that? I could easily apply all this knowledge to the affiliate marketing space to me. It's perfectly on point, but I also think this is probably just as valuable to SaaS founders, which I've only dabbled in that space in terms of going, okay, I don't think, I'm an officially thought leader with the exception that, okay, I've been running a SaaS company for years. I do enjoy doing that content, but I literally have two avenues.

[00:51:20] John Wright: So the listener already knows what this title is. I have the ability to split test it, but I just don't know which one's gonna end up on Apple and Spotify plus the blog posts and YouTube and you name it. Yeah, and one thing that just occurred to me that we haven't talked about, that we talked about before the show is that the solution that we found, the CaliQ process, which I've been doing for years, turns out to be universal. It works for anybody. It works for any company. It works for any business. It works for any product. And the other thing is it worked in the past. It works today and it will work in the future.

[00:51:58] John Wright: And what I love about what we've done is 10 years ago, I just thought it was a neat solution. It was a neat way to rebrand myself on my brand when somebody was searching my name. Turns out I stumbled across the single simplest absolute universal truth,

[00:52:16] John Wright: which is brand drives digital marketing, brand drives SEL. And if you've got a brand, you've got something to hook onto and you've got a future. Yeah, I remember that was interesting where this was like a 10 year old process. I was like, wait, this sounds like it's new. Like it could have been created less than a year ago. 100%. I mean, it's kind of tricky for me because I always think, oh, I can help you with that. I can help you with that. I can help everybody with everything, technically. But in real terms, I can't. I need to niche down. So we're niching down and we're focusing on CEOs

[00:52:54] John Wright: and founders of companies with $2 million or more of revenue because they are the people who need a personal brand because they understand that their personal brand drives business for the company. And that makes business sense. Well, I think in thinking out loud, maybe this angled more towards SaaS companies could be interesting because it'll get me one foot in the door in that space. I know it can definitely help you. And I think as well, we actually have a weird connectivity by listing all SaaS companies that like, we don't do this yet, but we're just getting started.

[00:53:28] Jason Barnard: So we do have a weird, what's the word, synergy in affiliate marketing with SaaS companies are going, which SaaS companies don't have an affiliate program. Well, if you have one, you can be listed in our directory. And we obviously recommend other software for starting your own affiliate program, which is not something we do. So I think that's the angle of what this show's gonna be. We're gonna take a step out of affiliate marketing, but it's gonna have a smart way of making sure the SaaS space knows about us. Brilliant, wonderful. Thank you so much, that was delightful. I'm gonna include all the links in the show notes and Jason, thank you so much for doing this. That was a lot of fun.

[00:54:05] Jason Barnard: John Wright, C, John C Wright, excuse me, you're gonna rebrand. Yes, exactly.

[00:54:14] John Wright: Thank you for tuning in to the affiliate BI podcast. I'd like to take this time to ask for a small favor to leave a rating and review wherever you listen to your podcast. That helps us expand our reach and rank higher in podcast directories and reach more listeners.